The Star Wars: Magic of Myth exhibit was sponsored by Lucasfilm and Bantam Books. The exhibit was held in the upper East wing of the Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C. and was in fact in the same location as the Star Trek exhibit shown six years earlier. The exhibit ran from October 31, 1997 to January 31, 1999.
The exhibit consisted of two small theaters that continually ran a 27 minute short video in which George Lucas discussed some of the key influences in his early life that caused him to want to bring the Star Wars experience to life. Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and a number of other key production people also provided their own perspectives about the making and meaning of the trilogy. After the short video, each visitor then entered the main 6,000 square foot self guided artifact exhibit.
The main artifact exhibit consisted of over two hundred pieces of artwork that included several of the eight foot models used in the trilogy, as well as many of the smaller models, costumes, puppets, and hand props. Featured on the walls of the exhibit were many dozens of paintings and other pieces of concept, production, and storyboard artwork. On the second floor above the main exhibit was a large Star Wars store where you could buy just about any Star Wars product ever made. In fact, I bought my Icons Darth Vader lightsaber there.
I ended up spending a total of 16 hours in the exhibit over the coarse of the four days I was there. I spent about seven hours just shooting the 230 photographs that I took home with me. I thought I might be thrown out of the exhibit on several occasions because I was photographing everything so extensively with fairly professional equipment. The exhibit's personnel apparently thought that I was working for a newspaper or magazine. It took me a little while to convince them that I was basically harmless and just a little obsessive about this stuff. I then spent another six hours videotaping, cataloging, and creating a map of the exhibit. After all of that, I finally got about three hours to just look the exhibit over.
I was especially pleased that the eight foot Star Destroyer model was exhibited. I've been waiting almost twenty years to see this model up close, and I now probably have the best collection of photos of this model on the planet. My only regret about the exhibit was that its creators didn't include more of the large capital ships. I would have loved to have seen the Super Star Destroyer, Rebel Blockage Runner and Medical Frigate models.
This was a great exhibit and I hope you were one of the 950,000 lucky people who got to view it. But for those of you who couldn't see it in person though, I have created this web page. I have very extensively documented the actual exhibit through 230 photographs, of which the best 137 are displayed here. To photograph the exhibit, I attached my camera to my small tripod and shot the exhibit using all of my various lenses set at an f-stop of either f16 or f22 with exposure times of either 4, 8, or 16 seconds. I recorded the images on Kodak 200 speed film without a flash.
Personally, after visiting the official Star Wars exhibit web site, I feel my presentation of the actual exhibit is far superior to the official web site. The official web site deals much more with the historical and military basis for the various props and military structure of the empire and the other entities that inhabit the Star Wars universe. That's all well and good and there is certainly a place for that, but if I weren't able to attend the exhibit myself, I would be at least as interested in being able to "virtually" attend it and view all of the items in it. And if that's what you're interested in, then my web site's for you. But I'll let you judge for yourself. You can find links to two of the official Star Wars exhibits on my "Links to other special effects web pages" web page, which is located on my main web page, or click here.